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I just wanted to thank everyone for the hugely positive reception for Combat Bureaucrat. I’ve seen so many posts, shares and likes over the past 48 hours and it means so much to me. I’ve spent four years writing this and you’ve made that time worth something.

Help me keep this going by leaving a review, however brief, on Amazon. I’m a one man shop. I’m the writer, editor, publisher and advertising department for this book and it’s going up against big books like American Sniper and Lone Survivor. Some of these books are published by big houses that hire people to buff up their reviews. Help me ensure that our story gets out there and stays out there for the world to see!

Again, thank you for everything. The past few days have been a dream come true.

For those that don’t know, I’ve been working (off and on for about four years) on a book about my time as an Army Officer in Afghanistan. It’s available and ready for download on Amazon. Here’s the link!

Please have a look and share with everybody you know.

THE END.

P.S. Sorry for not spending as much time with the blog recently. This ate up all of my time!

P.P.S. Thanks for sticking with me, guys and gals. I put a lot of work into this, I hope you all like it!

A year ago, I had to help one of my girlfriend’s college buddies move into his new place with his fiance. After a few hours of lugging their personal belongings up several flights of stairs, we were nearing the end. It was then that I learned that I was expected to help assemble a few IKEA pieces, namely the bed and a dresser. The girlfriend loved putting things together and committed us both to the project before I could come up with a reasonable excuse not to do it.

Fast-forward about thirty minutes and I’m struggling to assemble an IKEA bed-frame that must’ve gotten bent or warped in transit; the pieces just weren’t fucking going together. While attempting to screw together two metal brackets, I lost my grip and cut the shit out of my hand… with an IKEA Allen wrench of all things.

After I spat out a string of obscenities through clenched teeth, I took stock of my hand. It was bleeding pretty badly, but it was just venous blood so I didn’t need to get it treated. I wrapped it with my shirt and realized how absurd the situation was. There I was, holding a wound taken from assembling crappy Swedish furniture. Crappy Swedish furniture that is produced by a company whose business model requires you to pay them to do most of the work yourself, mind you. Somehow this company has managed to Jedi mind-trick most of the world into believing that this is a fun project or do-it-yourself venture. As I was standing there staunching the bleeding, I began to fantasize about a world where the IKEA senior corporate leadership had to deal with their own shit on a 24/7 basis.

After all, leadership of any kind and at any level shouldn’t ask people to do things they aren’t willing to do themselves. I continually preach this and I go so far as to recommend that politicians deploy to and fight in the wars they propose, but I digress… Back to the IKEA corporate leadership.

I hope their day starts with a commute like this.

Then they have to get to the board room two hours prior to the meeting to fucking put the chairs together.

They’re not even spared during international flights because their boarding passes would have the IKEA logo proudly emblazoned on the front for all to see.

Even hotel stays would be extra special for them.

Even in death, they aren’t spared.

THE END.

P.S. The book about my time in Afghanistan is coming along nicely! Expect more news in the coming weeks. It’ll be out and ready to pick up via digital download at the end of March!

P.P.S. Send all your thoughts and positive energy to Hank Hughes. The Oscars are coming up and I’d love to see his film, Day One, win!

UPDATE – Hank didn’t win, but it was really awesome and surreal to hear his name announced live during the Academy Awards. Please go check out his film, if you haven’t already. The link is above.

Hi interwebs! I know I’ve been away for a few months, but it’s been for a good reason. The book is almost done and I’ve been up to my eyeballs in editing and draft work.

Good news for you though, I desperately needed a break so I decided to put together a little something special for you. Enjoy!

People often mistake me for a thoughtful and happy person. To the casual observer, I’ll pause over mundane items or statements and find something entertaining. Sometimes, I’ll even chuckle quietly to no one but myself. This is usually done with a slight head tilt, vacant smile and an upward glance, like I’m using my head as an aluminum covered TV antenna to tune in to my own very special broadcast. What a pleasantly happy idiot, right?

The truth of the matter is little more dark. When I’m standing there giggling like a moron, people should know that I’m a mostly functioning mental patient and I’ve found something hilarious by connecting a weird series of associations in my brain. It’s usually so obscure and removed from what I’m looking at, that I don’t share it with other people. Over the years, I’ve learned that I have a very strange sense of humor, usually from the reactions of those close to me.

If my brain were a person, this is what it would look like.

Creepy right? If I knew how to go about drawing an anthropomorphized brain tweaking its own nipples, I would have. Consider yourself lucky I’m not a better artist.

Normally I wouldn’t share my weird inner thoughts for fear of torch-wielding villagers, but with the power of internet anonymity, I can do that with you now!

Here’s a good first example. I bought a blue colored sea salt scrub from Lush, an all natural and very granola bath product company. The first time I used it, I noticed this icon on the label, proclaiming their intent to fight the practice of animal testing.

I started laughing because this is what I immediately thought of.

Before that, I was walking out of work when I noticed a TV news headline on one of the many TVs in the hospital that were always on and playing to no one in particular. The headline read, “Ryan Seacrest Live.”

I let out a small chuckle that caught the glance of a few patients in the waiting area. This is what I envisioned.

Not even touching, tear-jerking charity commercials are safe from my weird imagination. I cracked up when I saw a pancreatic cancer awareness commercial narrated by Bryan Cranston.

I smiled like a maniac when I saw this news story. An 11 year old boy boarded a mega bus from Nashville and took it to Atlanta, where he was picked up by the Atlanta police when they found him wandering the streets alone. When the story concluded, the official statement from Atlanta police was that they were not sure if they were going to release him. I’m sure this was done because they hadn’t contacted the boy’s parent/ guardian yet an they were figuring that out, but that didn’t stop my crazy brain from going down into one of its weird rabbit holes.

THE END!

P.S. 12,000 subscribers and counting! Thanks to everyone who makes this blog what it is!

P.P.S. Again, sorry for the dry spell and thanks for your continued support and patience!

The Christmas shopping season always makes me think. Companies all across the US are looking to unload their garbage onto you or your loved ones and they’re willing to use any tactic in the book. Holiday sales used to be just Black Friday and then Cyber Monday, but now they’ve added more days and weeks to the sales and I just can’t keep track of it all. It just seems to be a nonstop orgy of sales all the way between Thanksgiving and Christmas. As someone without a lot of people on my Christmas shopping list, I get my Holiday shopping done early and without much fuss. I then get to sit back and watch in complete awe as my phone, radio and email explode with special once in a lifetime offers for shit that I’ve never expressed any interest in whatsoever.

This is what every Holiday sales season feels like to me.

THE END.

P.S. I actually left out a few of the other holidays that have been steadily added to incrementally bloat Christmas Shopping Season over the years.

This past July, I took a trip out to LA for the new job. It was part two of my training and I had been to LA previously for two weeks in May. On the first trip in May, I had flown from Newark, NJ to LAX and, of course, they had lost my luggage. I had traveled from New Jersey in summer attire which left me looking like an extra from the Jersey Shore. That’s always a great look for the “meet the company leadership and be sure to wear business casual” introduction day.

I’m the king of good first impressions.

As eventful as that first trip was, I’m here to write about the second trip. This time around, it seemed that all was going well. We had completed our two week training without incident and I was boarding the plane at LAX to take me back east to Newark. I’m a believer that the human mind likes to lump things in groups of three so when I sat down in the exact middle of a triangle of screaming infants, I thought that would be the summit of my suffering and not part one of a horrible trifecta of events. I had no idea how bad things were about to get.

The babies were all perfectly spaced and facing inward, toward me. It was like Hell’s version of surround sound.

Now I want you to know that I’m a very understanding and patient man because I have to be. I’ve spent years with a very good psychologist to ensure it. The alternative being, that with my training and violent past, I would horribly injure or kill someone for the slightest infraction based on my mercurial mood, Earth’s alignment with other planets and possibly, what direction the breeze is blowing that moment.

I don’t think you guys would like to get my posts from prison. I think g-mail automatically blocks anything from Rikers Island anyway and my readership would likely suffer.

What I’m trying to say is that I was managing just fine with the screaming babies. I understood that they were far more upset and uncomfortable than I was. I had my little Zen moment, did my breathing exercise and I was good after that. Then the kid behind me started digging his knees into my seat. His tiny, bony knees found the one soft spot in the seat and directed an impressive amount of force directly into my lumbar area. “It’s another test.” I told myself. I closed my eyes and had a silent conversation with God.

With my little confrontation with God done, I leaned forward in my seat to get away from the pressure in my back and I put in my headphones at full blast. I could still faintly hear the infant symphony over Blind Melon’s No Rain, but I was managing.

About an hour into the flight, I had to change my posture. I’m a tall man and leaning forward to the tip of a coach seat was starting to take its toll. I leaned back a little and was immediately stabbed in the back by those bony, squirming knees which, I assumed, had been screwing mindlessly into the seat for the past hour. I don’t know if it was Against Me’s Piss and Vinegar on my headphones, but my peaceful aura was shattered.

“Fuck this kid.” I thought to myself. I hauled myself up out of my seat and turned around to the child behind me, fully prepared to deal with him and his family that was surely seated beside him.

When I saw the kid, I was a little taken aback. He was about five and looked very dark and foreign. His skin was almond colored and his eyes and hair jet black. I imagined that he came from some part of the earth that was full of mangoes and snakes. He was still jamming his knees into the seat like he was bracing against the inevitable plane crash.

“Hey, kid.” I said. He looked at me and continued working his knees into the seat, clearly not understanding what I had said let alone the distress he was causing me. I looked at him more closely and saw a placard on his chest. It was suspended by a white yarn lanyard. It seemed cheap and temporary like it was only for this trip. I had just read the word “Myanmar” when the man next to the child spoke up. “I don’t think he speaks English dude.” I looked over at the man seated next to the child. It was immediately apparent that this child was seated next to strangers and not his family. The man who had spoken to me was black and about my age. I nodded and sat back down into my seat, my anger and indignation melting away and leaving behind unease and confusion. “Who was this kid? Why was he traveling alone?” I asked myself.

I got up and went to the bathroom to give my back a break. When I was finished and returning to my seat, I noticed several other people of similar ethnicity with little placards peppered throughout the plane. The biggest concentration of them was about two rows in front of my seat. There seemed to be about eighteen of them in total. I found my way back to my seat, inched my way to the front of it and braced myself for the rest of the flight.

I was using my special power of focusing on nothing and accelerating time when I was brought back into the moment. The group of placard people in front of me began speaking in hushed and urgent tones. All of the talk seemed to be directed toward one unconscious woman in the Myanmar party. Another Myanmar woman got up and was urgently trying to get the woman to come to. Moments later, the woman sputtered to consciousness and mumbled something. I could only see the back of her head but there was no mistaking the sound and smell of her retching all over herself. The placard party looked around nervously, speaking their quick and clipped language which, I could only assume, was Burmese. A few seconds later, two flight attendants appeared and began questioning the group. I had pulled out my earphones and was listening intently.

It quickly became apparent that the best English speaker in the group was an indifferent looking middle aged male. He soon was the spokesperson for the Myanmar group.

This was mind-blowing for me because that meant that they had been flying non-stop from Hong Kong for the past 48 hours and they didn’t think it was a good idea to feed some of the members of their party. I began hating the male spokesperson of the group. Maybe something was lost in translation, but his tone and affect conveyed such a level of callous indifference toward the sick woman. He spoke as if he were just informed that the family dog had taken ill in the cargo hold.

The flight attendants gave each other knowing glances and the woman asked if anyone on board the plane was a doctor. No one responded. She then lowered the criteria to nurse. Again, crickets. She then asked if anyone had any medical experience at all. There was complete silence yet again. I waited for a second or two and looked around. There were no hands up. “Fuck.” I thought to myself, “It looks like I’m the only show in town.” My hand went up and the female flight attendant came over to me.

I thought about some of the highlights of my medical experience.

I left out the specifics because my medical experience consisted of dabbling in cardiology for the past two years and, before that, years of battlefield trauma experience. It didn’t look like anybody had been shot or was suffering a heart attack so I was probably in over my head.

I got out of my seat and was directed toward the sick passengers. I looked at the vomiting woman and saw that her colorful dress was covered in a kaleidoscope of vomit and bile. Her friend was stuffing a towel onto her mouth in an attempt to stymie the tide of puke. The sick woman looked up at me, pitifully, and then wretched once more into her towel. Her vomit was thin and clear. She had clearly emptied the contents of her stomach minutes ago.

I looked at the flight attendant and told her that all we could do was wait it out and keep her hydrated once she stopped vomiting so profusely. After that, we could try some nausea medication, but I wasn’t sure what she was allergic to, if anything. This answer seemed to satisfy the flight crew who began getting juice and water from the beverage cart. I put my hand on the sick woman’s forehead and felt that she was burning up. She must have had a 100+ fever.

Before I could think further, the sound of projectile vomit erupted from behind me. I turned slowly and saw another woman in the Myanmar group, spilling her guts onto the floor. Then, in keeping with our theme of threes, an elderly woman in the Myanmar party joined the vomiting chorus.

I looked at the flight attendant.

She nodded and hurried off to the flight deck, leaving me with the sick passengers and the male flight attendant.

“Well this is fucking great.” I thought to myself. I looked back at my empty seat and saw that the little boy was still worming his knees into the back of my chair. I then noticed that the screaming babies were still going. “Had they stopped and started up again or had they been going this whole time?” I asked myself.

I glanced back at the first sick woman. She was ashen and grey despite her dark complexion. Was this patient zero? Is this how the zombie apocalypse begins? Some random lady contracts some weird disease in the heart of Asia and then goes on a marathon flight across the world, infecting everyone along the way?

The PA system crackled to life

The male flight attendant thanked me for my help and directed me to my seat. The fasten seat-belt lights illuminated and I strapped myself back into my seat, feeling the familiar stab in my lower back. I was focused on patient zero in front of me. She had fallen unconscious again and I was worried that she was about to reanimate. I was alternating between staring a hole in the back of her head and looking around for objects to smash her skull open in case she turned.

I eventually settled on my tray table as my contingency weapon of choice. There was a good chance I could wrench it off and use one of the metal arms to stab her through the eye socket if it came down to it. I held the tray table and tested it against my grip. It creaked and groaned under my hands. “This could work” I thought to myself.

I was so immersed in thought that I didn’t realize that we were landing. When the wheels screeched against the tarmac, I was jolted back into a zombie-less reality. We taxied up to a distant terminal and waited there for a few moments. Shortly thereafter, paramedics boarded the plane and began disembarking the entire Myanmar group. I felt those tiny knees pull out of my back and, moments later, saw the little boy gingerly skip behind the parade of deathly ill people as they were all ushered off the plane.

Suddenly, the flight seemed so much less exciting and, in a way, I was sad that it was over. Sure, the flight was scary and uncomfortable and there was a slight chance that I had contracted some incurable super-virus, but I couldn’t remember the last time that I had such a long flight that had kept me so occupied.

Then, in the perfect stillness of the motionless plane, the trio of screaming babies started back up.

THE END.

P.S. I didn’t catch anything at all from that flight. As far as I know, the group immigrating from Myanmar was quarantined for what could’ve been MERS but, to this day, I’m not entirely sure.

P.P.S. I hope that I didn’t offend anybody from Myanmar or Burma or whatever-the-fuck you call it. I’m sure it’s a great place to visit.

Hi everybody! I’m not dead. At least, I don’t think so anyway. So far, I can still grab doorknobs and other objects without my hand phasing through them so that’s a good sign.

Speaking of grabbing things in the house, I got up yesterday and made a huuuuge breakfast. When it was all done, I did what I always do and just put all the pots, pans and dishes in the sink to “soak”.

I got up this morning and saw a dirty pile of greasy dishes in the sink and I realized that I suck at being an adult. I truly had no real expectations to do these dishes at all this weekend. Instead, I hold onto the belief that, one day, I’m just going to morph into a person who actually wants to be responsible. After some horribly accurate introspection, I discovered the ugly truth is that I have a very strong desire to be hugely irresponsible and do as little as possible all the time. Don’t get me wrong, I still put my pants on and go to work everyday.

Well, most days anyway.

I handle the big stuff like paying bills and whatnot, but I find it’s the little things that I slack on. I find that I lie to and convince myself that what I’m doing is responsible or frugal or (insert positive adjective here) and not just a by-product of outright laziness.

I think it all comes down to this disconnect that I have with what I think will happen vs. what actually happens.

I’ll wash the car after it rains so I’ll have less pollen or whatever to rinse off.

I think nature will go out of its way and help me clean my car.

Sadly, it doesn’t rain for months and my car is covered in all manner of shit.

I’ll set my alarm thirty minutes early so I can have the time to enjoy a nice breakfast and put myself into a ridiculously cheery mood, complete with singing.

Here’s what happens instead… I hit snooze until the last minute and have a spoonful of peanut butter and some vitamins like an anorexic model. I’m so tired that I can’t even be angry. I just look back at my life in a moment of quiet, painful reflection.

I convince myself that I’ll take out the trash & recycling once all cans are full so I’m more efficient with my time and energy.

Here’s what really happens; the wine and liquor bottles fill the glass bin exponentially faster than all other types of recycling and my neighbors get to see how much of an irresponsible drunk I actually am.

I think I’ll update my blog every Sunday so my thousands of subscribers will continue to like me.

But, here’s what I do… I finish every Sunday the exact same way they start; with a bottle of whiskey and no pants.

THE END.

P.S. Sometimes a little bit of writing gets done on Sundays.

P.P.S. Usually not a lot, unfortunately. I still want us to be friends though. Here, I made a smiley face for you… 🙂

I spent a long time thinking about what to showcase in this next segment. “What could be more awesome than Gak?” I asked myself. After some deep soul-searching, the answer was Saturday morning cartoons. As a wee lad, Saturday morning cartoons were the highlight of my week…

Er, maybe the highlight of my early existence.

Spider-man was indeed awesome, but it was one of many great cartoons. I thought about which Saturday morning cartoons were my favorites for a bit and then, all of a sudden, it came to me.

One word…Thundercats.

That’s right, Thundercats. I know some of you are probably crying foul right now. “But underwhelmer, Thundercats aired from 1985 to 1988 and technically isn’t an early 90s show.” I hear your concerns, but that’s what made Thundercats even more awesome to me as a kid. In the early 90s, it was all reruns and they were all out of order; completely demolishing any semblance of a plot or feeling of continuity between episodes.

My memories of the show hold up much better than the actual show itself. I re-watched a couple of episodes and came to the conclusion that it was completely fucking insane. The basis of the show was on the same preposterous level as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Ninjitsu master, teenage, pizza-addicted, crime fighting anthropomorphized turtles named after the great masters of art and science? Why the hell not?

Thundercats made no more sense than the turtles. First off, they’re space-faring cat people who are fleeing the destruction of their planet, Thundera. Let your mind wrap around that one for a moment. Good now? OK. Next, they flee to a planet called, Third Earth (never-you-mind what happened to Second Earth.) Along this journey, they are nearly hunted to extinction by mutant marauders hailing from the unimaginatively named planet, Plun-Darr. The Thundercats stave off extinction with a magic sword that houses a powerful artifact called The Eye of Thundera. Upon landing on Third Earth, Lion-O is appointed the leader of the Thundercats despite the fact that (due to a stasis capsule accident) he literally has the mind of a child in the body of a cat/ Conan hybrid. The Thundercats build a base of operations called the Cat’s Lair with the help of the Third Earth natives, who we never seem to see in any other episodes. This plot hole is quickly left wide open with the swift arrival of the Plun-Darr marauders and the introduction of Mumm-Ra, who for no clear reason is a D&D Liche living the bowels of Third Earth. The series then catapults into a series of skirmishing conflicts between the Thundercats and the Mumm-Ra/ Plun-Darr alliance. Nothing is ever resolved and the Thundercats and Mumm-Ra’s forces are locked in perpetual struggle for dominance of a planet that seemed to be completely oblivious to the alien races battling in their jungles. In short, it was the perfect recipe for a Saturday morning cartoon; utter madness.

Despite the fact that the show was created by crazy people, it did follow a fairly structured episode layout. I think the below graph sums up about 90% of the episodes across all of the seasons… enjoy.

I got up this morning, made my coffee and sat at my writing desk, as is my usual Sunday ritual. My desk has a nice window view toward my neighborhood. I get to write and draw for hours while watching my neighbors do normal human things. There’s nothing like observing people interacting with each other outside on a bright, sunny day to remind me of how much of a creepy hermit I’ve become since I’ve started writing.

As I typed in my underpants, I noticed two ten-year-old boys sitting on the curb (stop thinking what you’re thinking you damned perverts) and they were both staring at their smart phones, presumably texting each other.

It was a beautiful day outside; why were they on their phones?. They’re frigging ten… why do they have smart phones in the first place? Shouldn’t they be chasing each other, throwing a ball or attaching fireworks to small animals?

I started thinking about how shitty it would be to re-live my childhood in 2013. I’m glad that I grew up in that VHS inspired, color saturated fashion apocalypse that was the early 90s. To illustrate how awesome this special period of time was to me, I’ve decided to put together a multi-part series showcasing, through charts and graphs, the ridiculous things that made being a kid in the 90s simply awesome. And with that, I give you an analysis of that wondrous material crafted by the fun-gineers over at Nickelodeon, Gak.